The interactive "Santa's
Village" world offers a bunch of educational games to teach
children geography, different holiday traditions, and basic
Javascript, and culminates on December 24 when "Santa Tracker"
lets you watch Mr. Claus's journey around the world on Google
Maps.

Santa Tracker started as the "20%
project" of a couple of Google Earth employees back in 2004
and has just snowballed from there, getting a little bigger,
better, and more well-staffed every year.

"It feels like such a 'Google' thing," project lead Andres
Ferrate, the project lead, told Business Insider. "This is
primarily a volunteer effort within the company, but every year
more people want to come help us and improve the experience."

Ferrate says that dozens of people of all different departments
helped out in creating the experience this year, with
contributions coming from Google offices in Tokyo, Australian,
Europe, Seattle, New York, and Silicon Valley. They have other
work to do, but make time to contribute to Santa's Village just
because they love working on it.

The company doesn't make any money off its efforts, but because
the entire village world is made using the same tools Google
provides to its third-party developers, it does get a chance to
showcase some of its products and how they can work together. It
also lets Google see which tools could use improvement, Ferrate
says, noting that"pushing the envelope" with some of them has led
to a lot of feedback to Google's product teams. The team
wanted to make it as magical an experience for kids as possible,
while still tying in an educational aspect.

At its core, the Santa's Village project is a good demonstration
of how Google works. CEO
Larry Page recently told Fortune that to make sure that
Google continues to be successful, he asks himself "Would I want
to work for Google?" He wants the company to be a good
environment for employees who are curious, entrepreneurial, and
looking to have an impact on the world. Sure, letting kids
experience the excitement of Santa's voyage in a new way isn't as
ground-breaking as, say, Google's goal of
using magnetic nanoparticles to search your blood for
disease, but it gives employees the chance to have fun.

Hiring "smart
creative" employees who have big ambitions is baked into
Google's fabric. Admittedly, sometimes that can mean having to
reel people's excitement in a little.

"We get a lot of unexpected surprises. People will just come out
of the wood-works and things that we hadn't even scoped in will
get added," Ferrate says. "We actually have to make sure we're
disciplined because otherwise this thing could grow a bit too big
and complex."